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Published: 2005-10-19 10:15:45 [ previous | next | back to article list ]

HTML-Kit

HTML-Kit is a program for web developers. With features like colorisation for a variety of common web languages such as HTML, PHP, Perl, VB, CSS, Javascript, a tabbed environment for multi-file editing, a resource manager with FTP connectivity and a multitude of tools and add-ons it's a powerful tool for developing web sites and applications, but it suffers from a some drawbacks and quirks.

HTML-Kit is distributed freely from Chami's place. It seems to suffer from a lack of ongoing development although incremental changes occasionally appear and certainly in my experience is not widely used in the development community, with stalwarts such as Dreamweaver or more exotic apps such as Ruby on Rails attracting much more patronage. But it's the devil you know, and as I have been now using HTML-Kit for some 3 years, I am still pretty comfortable with it's performance. It gets the job done.

A recent foray back to Homesite, an editor I previously used extensively, back in 1999 and 2000, reminded me of it's big failing, one I never found a way around. As an active web developer I need to maintain access to a set of diverse web servers. If I have to make minor maintenance on a server, I simply want to access the remote file, make changes and upload again. HTML-Kit makes this easy, with a dual local/FTP structure. Files opened from FTP folders are automatically uploaded on save. Of course, it means that precautions have to be taken to avoid overwrites and there is no locking mechanism to allow a team of developers to work safely on the same site files, but when working alone on a project this is possible.

More complex GUI tasks have not been coded in - the ability to drag and drop files across sites would be very useful. The FTP functionality could be beefed up generally. File upload and download is allowed, but multi-folder uploads don't work and it's generally impossible to change file attributes - at that point I resort to AceFTP to make changes. In fact, I find I have to work with an FTP client alongside HTML-Kit to handle the more complex file management tasks. This I would really like to see built in to the IDE.